VALVE YARD (CMT Trail stop 5)

For more details visit http://www.creatingmycambridge.com/trails/cmt/pumping-station-trail/

CMT TRAIL STOP 5 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

I really love this area best of all because I think it gives you the most wonderful view of the building especially the chimney. Look up there. Here we are the Valve Yard and it’s called the Valve Yard because it is full of valves which of these, they look like little table things with rings on top and they were used to control the flow of water and sewage around the pumping station. Imagine underneath our feet there is a whole network of tubes through which the water and sewage run and these wheels that we can see are used to direct the sewage around the pumping station and out into the holding tanks and then maybe back into the pumping station and off to the year sewage farm at Milton. And if you have a look each one has its own little plaque on so this one says ‘North Steam Engine to Old Main’ and it means that it would, that you'd use that to direct the water and the sewage out from the steam engine room, out to the old main going out to Milton but there are other ones saying ‘Gas Engine to Holding Tank’ and ‘Holding Tank to Steam Engine’ so it’s almost like the London Underground here with lots and lots of pipework and you had to be able to control it because if you got it wrong again the sewage would end up where it shouldn't do and outbreaks of unpleasant diseases would happen. If you look to our left you can see a new building and that the bricks are all a lovely whitey sandy colour. Originally the pumping station building would have been that colour it was built from local Cambridge white bricks but over the years with all the smoke and pollution that was around this area they have all blackened up, especially around the top of the chimney – it’s very black up there.

So the original parts of the pumping station were built in the early 1890s and finished in 1894. We understand that the builders were a local firm, Kerridges. I think the cost of the whole project was about £10,000 which was an awful lot of money in those days.